Lone Survivor

Peter Berg isn’t the director I would pick for a nuanced portrayal of the 2005 Navy Seals’ Operation Red Wings mission in Afghanistan. Berg had already directed the potentially complex but very Hollywood The Kingdom (2007), about a covert US mission in Saudi Arabia, and 2012’s Battleship, a sci-fi/military film based on a board game.

One of the film’s strongest passages is the credit sequence, wherein the extremes and nearly unbearable hardships involved in Navy Seals basic training is vividly shown. The training is so wrenching that many soldiers don’t experience in combat the severity of what they underwent in training (an entire, boring, movie was made about this subject, Sam Mendes’ 2005 Jarhead). The inaction of camp life, however, instills boredom, and when our four protagonists — Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch, and Ben Foster — are sent on a mission to find a Taliban commander, they’re ready to go.

Due to faulty communication equipment, the team is left stranded atop a mountain (New Mexico, standing in for northern Afghanistan; the scenery in the film is never less than stunning). When their hiding place is inadvertently discovered by a few Taliban-friendly citizens, the moral choice arrives which sets the rest of the film in place: Do the US soldiers let the citizens go, kill them, or tie them up, perhaps leaving them to die? When the citizens are let go, the Taliban is quickly informed and the rest of Lone Survivor is a relentless fight for survival.

Lone Survivor not a film to watch with your grandma. Peter Berg makes visceral every bullet taken, every bone-crunching, leg-shattering plunge, fall, and plummet. The bravery of the team is heroic against damning odds. Lone Survivor takes a microcosmic view of the war, but the costs of US lives was even worse: the team’s sixteen rescuers, all aboard a helicopter, were shot down and killed by the Taliban.

The production values of Lone Survivor are first rate, as is the acting. Eric Bana also stars as a Lieutenant Commander, but his role is woefully underwritten. The film could have benefited from seeing more of the Taliban; as it is, they’re miscellaneous figures picked off one by one, like red shirts in a video game. Lastly, the guitar-based music score by Explosions in the Sky and Steve Jablonsky becomes grating and inappropriate, though a traditional orchestral score would have been out of place, as well. For a story like this: maybe just silence.

—Michael R. Neno, 2014 Oct 3